That plan was never more apparent than in May 2015, when the
company announced
Azure Stack, a product that lets you build your own version
of the Microsoft Azure cloud on your own servers or data center.

Normally, Azure is an Internet-based service where you get access
to fundamentally unlimited supercomputing power, based in
Microsoft's globe-spanning data centers.

Today, the secret weapon is out, as Microsoft announces that
Friday, January 29th will see the release of the first
technical preview of Azure Stack, an early and free way for
developers and IT pros to mess around with the tool.

The idea behind Azure Stack, says Microsoft Corporate VP of
Enterprise Cloud Mike Neil, is to give customers all the
benefits of Microsoft Azure, whether or not they're ready to move
all of their computing infrastructure and apps up to the
so-called public cloud.

"We think of the cloud as a model, not a place," Neil says.

Hybrid

Tech types call this concept "hybrid cloud."

Cloud computing, of the kind exemplified by Amazon Web Services
and Microsoft Azure, has all kinds of benefits over a more
traditional data center approach. In old-fashioned data
centers, you're generally not using each piece of hardware
to its full capacity, leading to a lot of wasted resources.

But clouds are far better at resource management than a
traditional data center. Resources get pooled into one big pile
that applications can draw on as needed.

Microsoft Azure takes this a step further by providing more
platform services, providing more tools for developers to
build their applications in the Microsoft cloud.

It's this crazy-efficient approach that lets Amazon Web Services
and Microsoft Azure offer supercomputing services to customers at
ever-lower prices, often at less than 10 cents per hour
of use. Amazon calls it the virtuous cycle: The more customers it
gets, the more cash it has to reinvest in infrastructure, and the
lower it can drive prices and bolster its features.

Not every customer can take advantage of this, though.
Highly-regulated industries like banking or medicine have
rules against uploading certain kinds of data to a public
cloud. For research labs and the like, it's often impractical to
upload terabytes of, say, genetic sequencing data to Azure via
the Internet for processing.

In a practical sense, too, lots of customers are unwilling or
unable to ditch their existing server and data center investments
just to go to the cloud, a model that lots of IT pros still see
as untested. Instead, most go at it piecemeal, application by
application.

"There are very few customers who are 100% cloud," Neil says.

Stack attack

So here comes Azure Stack, a solution that for all intents and
purposes works like Azure, including its efficient resource
utlization and developer tools.

Since it's the same set of tools and infrastructure, Neil says,
it makes it simple to pick up and move an application or a swath
of infrastructure and move it from an Azure Stack installation in
a local data center and into the Azure public cloud.

"By having that be consistent, we have that option," Neil
says. "You get the same user experience."

The only difference, really, between Microsoft Azure and Azure
Stack, is the computing power and storage available to you.

When Azure Stack is released unto the world, customers will have
a few options, Neil says. Either they'll be able to download the
software, get an instruction manual from Microsoft, and go do it
themselves. Or they can buy some pricey server hardware, called
the
Cloud Platform System, developed jointly by Dell, HP,
and Microsoft, that has it pre-set up.

Satya
Nadella and Michael Dell on stage at Dell World
2015Screenshot/Dell

The most likely customers will be big companies who want to
kick their data centers up to a higher level of efficiency, Neil
says, although he claims some smaller businesses who still use
on-premises infrastructure might also be interested. In fact,
Microsoft has started using it internally as a
tool to help move all of its internal infrastructure to Azure,
too, he says.

All of this is something that competitors like Google and Amazon
can't match — neither company has a real product to compete with
Azure Stack, and generally takes the stance that the future is in
the Internet-based public cloud, and the public cloud only.
Besides, Neil says, none of them have Microsoft's expertise with
business software.

There are technologies, most prominently the
OpenStack software, that also let you build a cloud in your
own data center. But Neil scoffs, saying that Azure Stack is
designed to be much easier to use for the Microsoft customer than
any competitor.

"If you have an army of grad students, you can get that to work,"
says Neil.